Biggest news of the day: My Bloody Valentine to release new album by year’s end

We’re all very happy that this interminable election is finally over and done with, but there’s another important reason to rejoice today: My Bloody Valentine will be releasing new material sometime before the end of the year! Considering their last full-length release was 1991’s stunning Loveless, the 21-year wait leading up to this momentous occasion was only less excruciating than the election because we actually like My Bloody Valentine.

NME has the word on the new record’s sound straight from Kevin Shields: “Based on the very, very few people who’ve heard stuff — some engineers, the band, and that’s about it — some people think it’s stranger than Loveless. I don’t. I feel like it really frees us up, and in the bigger picture it’s 100% necessary.” I finally calmed down from the election, and now I’ve got goose bumps all over again!

Shields will release the new, untitled album through his website, with an EP of more new material to follow shortly thereafter. When it rains, it pours buckets of shoegazey goodness.

MBV is currently scheduled to headline Japan’s Tokyo Rocks festival in May 2013, providing the band with the biggest space they’ve ever performed in, so there’s a chance news of more shows will emerge once the album drops? We can only hope!

Remember last month when Animal Collective cancelled their show in Brooklyn because Davey Tare’s completely unsustainable style of singing landed him a king-size case of shingles? A-ha! Me neither, because it was laryngitis! And his name’s Avey Tare! And his voice is obviously AWESOME! Either way, your ass has just been freakin’ outed as an official Animal Collective Poseur, so you’ll have to sit in the corner over there by the giant foam teeth and papier-mâché icicles listening to Foster the People while I issue the following proclamation to the AnCo Faithful:

The band has just announced a pair of NYC make-up shows at Terminal 5 in Manhattan on December 4 and 5. Fans who purchased tickets for last month’s cancelled Brooklyn dates will be awarded the distinct animal-vantage of being able to purchase tickets for the new shows starting today, before tickets are available to the public on Friday, November 9. (Looks like only the December 5 show is up on Ticketmaster right now, but the December 4 show should pop up here soon, according to the band’s PR animals). Additionally, Animal Collective will be donating some of the proceeds from these shows to the ongoing Red Cross Hurricane Sandy relief effort.

In the wake of last week’s epic Snowicane that left parts of the greater New York City area devastated, Long Island native and all-around good guy Dan Deacon has announced that proceeds from his upcoming shows in NYC and Brooklyn will be donated to support the ongoing disaster relief effort.

Here’s Deacon’s message to fans and attendees:

Having grown up on Long Island, so much of my family and many of my close friends live in New York and New Jersey. I don’t feel right to going there, playing these shows and not pitching in to help out with the recovery so I’m going to donate my fee for these two shows to the Red Cross and Occupy Sandy. I chose these two organizations because they both cover the entire affected region and are both helping in very different capacities. I thought it would be best to inform my fans so that if they were also feeling conflicted about raging and partying while all this shit is so fucked, that at least they would know that their ticket was going to help aid in the recovery. Hopefully this can help ease the recovery for even just a few people. I encourage everyone to pitch in and give what they can in volunteer hours or donations.

Dan Deacon’s made it possible to jump up and down while trying to get a glimpse of that glowing skull he uses to enchant audiences and feel charitable at the same time. If you don’t live in New York, Deacon will be playing a number of other shows across North America, and donations can be made to any number of relief organizations tasked with rebuilding the parts of New York and New Jersey effected by the storm.

With the closing of the voter polls this evening, America will learn if nothing is going to happen or if worse things will happen. The best part? No more campaigning, no more spending millions on ads right in our faces while we eat cold beans from a can while surrounded by a murky moat of Sandy aftermath. But some of you love the idea of the campaign: touring around the country, spreading one’s gospel, selling anthology box sets. Well, good news for those dudes, as ZS are embarking on the campaign trail, starting November 25.

Left-wing saxophonist Sam Hilmer is running for re-election as BOSS with new running mates drummer Greg Fox (ex-Liturgy, Guardian Alien) and guitarist Patrick Higgins (ex-Animal, Bachanalia). In the process, they’ll promote their most recent economy-stimulator of all things ZS on one voluptuous boxset, Score - The Complete Sextet Works: 2002-2007, which was released on September 11, a patriotic day, mind you.

You can see an inspirational outtake from a ZS campaign on Noisey, if you’d like. Have a star-spangled tissue handy to wipe the tears that will potentially fall from your God-fearing eyes. Also check out a free track from the boxset here:

Below we’ve listed campaigning dates and locations. As you can see, ZS are paying careful attention to swing state Ohio.

A sad weekend. My good friend Doogie Paul died of cancer early on Saturday morning. Doogie had played double bass with me since 2001 and we’d toured all over together, playing hundreds of shows and recording five albums and numerous other things. He’d been first diagnosed a couple of years ago, but had appeared to have responded well to the treatment, to such an extent that he was well enough to play the Moving Up Country 10th Anniversary shows earlier this year. However, he relapsed at some point and this was discovered just a few weeks ago. He went down hill very quickly towards the end of last week.

His playing was spot on, instinctive and passionate. Onstage I could always rely on him to follow me down which ever path I took the songs, going off the rails spectacularly if needs be, or sitting back and playing beautifully softly, singing along with that crazy almost falsetto voice of his. I remember his harmonies in ‘Blue Bleezin’ Blind Drunk’ crossed the line between the major and the minor and sounded downright odd, but they also worked somehow, suggesting all sorts of different emotions. And he could speak abstract too - or pretended to, which helped me a great deal. So, if I said - I want a song to sound like an angry bear who’s just dropped his chainsaw onto his foot, Doog would give it a go, without raising an eyebrow - at least not whilst I was in the room. And as a musician, you need people like that, people who’ll trust you and go with your daft whims. It’s a hugely valuable trait. […]

You can pay your own condolences at the public facebook group remembering Doogie here.

You know how a lot of people really like vinyl records because they enjoy the ritual of album hunting in tiny, dusty record shops and are willing to pay extra for the tangibility of a beautifully-made artifact that properly celebrates the deep and lasting personal connection inherent to a work of art, such as a meticulously crafted and carefully sequenced full-length album, and how they revel in the time spent carefully cataloging, storing, and displaying their inventory as an intimate reflection on their unique taste, personality, and cache of cultural capital? Ahh, sounds dreamy and romantic, doesn’t it?

Well, wake the fuck up, motherfucker. Those people are idiots. What they should be doing is leasing some goddamn MP3s from a computer company and then storing them anonymously out in some California warehouse. And Google wants to be that California warehouse.

According to Billboard, the company announced last week that it’s finally upping the ante on its Google Play download store and online locker service. For starters, they finally managed to get a license for the Warner Music Group catalog (suck it, Neil Young; I’m downloading all your shit, dubbing it to cassette, ripping that cassette to CD, and then streaming that CD on Bandcamp!), nearly a year after the service first launched. But perhaps more awesomely, now that this last piece of the puzzle is in place, they are finally add a song-match feature that’s competitive with Apple’s iTunes Music Match and whatever the hell Amazon calls theirs, whereby the service scans your catalog and automatically matches songs in Google’s library without the user having to upload songs to their Google Play locker manually. But perhaps EVEN MORE AWESOMELY, Google Play’s shit will be free (both Apple and Amazon charge $25 a year) for up to 20,000 songs.

Strangely, Google hasn’t really, you know, “announced” these significant upgrades to its service, and there are currently zero promotions up on the Google Play page about the whole Warner thing, but Zahavah Levine, director of content partnerships for Android and possible real-life android, claims that Google is “going to work with Warner in the next couple weeks to figure that out,” by which he presumably meant that once TMT broke the story, that’d be all the promotion they’d ever need. Either way, Google Play’s new shit will roll out in five European markets — UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain — on November 13, and I predict that it’ll spread to other markets (like the US) as quickly and with as much alarming toxicity as the raging apocalyptic fires that’ll result when all the people of the world simultaneously and ceremoniously burn their hideous vinyl collections.